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Leonardo grew up outside Florence, in the countryside,
in a little village, Vinci.
His mother was a peasant woman. He himself was illegitimate.
But his father was a very respectable notary
who married and had a legitimate family
into which Leonardo was, to some extent, absorbed.
So there was no question of him being disowned.
And his career was supported,
even if it wasn't necessarily going to be a reiteration of his father's career.
And what we've seen quite often in Italian Renaissance history
is that illegitimate sons
have a kind of ambition that takes them to the fore.
Renaissance Italy is very extraordinary.
There is this intellectual driving force because, more than any other country,
they felt the weight, or the tradition of classical antiquity.
Rome was around them and you combined that
with early capitalist economies, on a small scale, but very dynamic.
You had the city states, like Venice, and so on, which had major artists,
but Florence was extraordinary.
In the early 1500s, you had this astonishing flowering
of Brunelleschi, the architect,
Donatello, the sculptor,
Masaccio, the painter, and a host of others.
Art was becoming, in Florence, an intellectual pursuit.
Florence was an intensely mercantile city.
It was a city of transactions.
And even the great Medici had banking interests that spread across Europe.
But they also wanted to show that they were culturally sophisticated
and that they were using their wealth
for the benefit of the city,
for the benefit of their own souls,
when they were commissioning religious works of art.
So what you've got is this lovely melting pot
of factions and families in competition,
and painters who might serve one or other of them
and who were also themselves looking over their shoulder
all the time for what the latest innovation was.
"Leonardo's father one day took some of his son's drawings
to the artist Andrea del Verrocchio, who was a good friend of his,
and directly asked him what he thought.
Andrea was astonished by what he saw
and arranged that Leonardo should enter his workshop."
Giorgio Vasari, painter and historian.
This is the Tobias and the Angel from the studio of Andrea del Verrocchio,
a painting from the early to mid-1470s.
It's an apocryphal story in which the Archangel Raphael comes to young Tobias
and instructs him to take parts of the fish,
the gall, and the liver, and the heart, I believe,
as a remedy to cure the blindness of his father.
It raises some very interesting questions about how workshops work
and, indeed, how Leonardo functioned within the Verrocchio workshop.
Verrocchio was one of the pre-eminent workshops.
Many very important painters passed through the Verrocchio studio
in the 1460s and '70s.
I think one of the appeals of working with Andrea del Verrocchio
for someone like Leonardo
was the fact that this was, like many of these Florentine workshops,
a production centre for all manner of objects,
both two-dimensional, three-dimensional.
There was drawing, there was painting, there was casting, there was carving.
And, of course, the multiplicity of interests that Leonardo demonstrated
in his subsequent career
certainly had some resonance with what went on in the Verrocchio studio.
Where this painting in particular is involved, I think,
it's raised some very interesting ideas about collaboration and delegation,
suggesting that some of the details of this picture
might have been by the young Leonardo as an apprentice.
We know that he had some sort of formal training in the Verrocchio workshop
between 1469 and 1472.
It's been suggested that certain elements
that are more naturally observed,
more realistically observed,
have a higher degree of skill in execution,
like the movement of the dog and the fur,
or the fish and the way it hangs from the string so convincingly,
might be ascribed to the young Leonardo himself.
The traditional painting medium in the Renaissance,
certainly at the beginning of the 15th century,
was egg... egg used, mixed with water and pigments,
and applied in a fine, hatched way.
The introduction of oil painting is something that happened
during the latter part of the 15th century.
There were instances of pictures appearing from Northern Europe
and I think it had a tremendous impact on the way Italian artists worked,
both a need, or an interest rather, in learning how to paint this way,
but also it opened up different ideas about what you could depict
and what effects you could make.
We can point to certain moments.
For example, the arrival of the van der Goes Portinari altarpiece
in Florence from Bruges
was a revelation, I think, to Florentine artists working in that time.
With Leonardo, it's certainly true that oil painting
was a relatively new technique that was available.
It certainly allowed him to explore and to depict things
the optics of vision and the way that things go in and out of focus,
or the way that shadows lose their colour in lower light.
All these things you can achieve much more convincingly with the oil medium.
That certainly was his interest,
and it lies deep at the heart of many of the things
he tried to do and paint later in his career.
Leonardo thought that paintings should be able
to show everything that was visible
and everything that was invisible in our universe.
He started that way of thinking
by looking very, very closely at the world around him.
For example, one of his very earliest drawings shows, apparently,
a view of the Arno Valley.
It's dated, it feels like an observation and yet there are aspects to it
which I think most of us would now agree are almost impossible.
So the point of his landscapes,
the point of his observation of the human figure,
is that he's always wanting to move from the specific to the ideal
and from the observed to the imagined.
Probably his earliest independent painting was The Annunciation,
which is a long, rectangular panel,
with the standard subject of the angel and the Virgin Mary,
but with enormous amount of effort going into it.
Leonardo spends a lot of time on the perspective of the Virgin's house,
and we know from scientific examination,
the walls, initially, are rather different
with the window in a different place.
So, he's saying, "Look, I can do perspective."
The draperies are done taking a lay figure with linen,
which is then soaked in clay and draped over the figures,
giving a very sculptural impression.
And, above all, he is saying, "Look what I can do with nature."
The carpets of flowers in the enclosed garden, which is symbolic of the Virgin,
are absolutely wriggling with life and vitality.
And then the angel's wing is based on a bird.
You've got this observation of the feathers.
The primaries at the end of the wing have deteriorated a lot.
So, there's a rather offsetting brown smudge,
but you look at the rest of the wing,
the secondaries, all the other feathers,
are painted with this enormous sense of observation.
So, this young man is saying,
"Look what I can do. I can master all the key things in art."
The Annunciation that Leonardo made very early in his career
can be seen as the culmination of his apprenticeship
in Verrocchio's workshop.
We have continued to study and make new investigations.
Not only looking at the finished painting
but also understanding all the stages
Leonardo went through to arrive at the final composition.
Looking at the changes he made
he clearly did not arrive immediately
at a complete and definitive conclusion.
There is undoubtedly on Leonardo's part
a kind of internal challenge.
So this is not so much a problem of wanting
immediately to prove himself as an innovative artist
but really the need to challenge himself
and therefore to progress.
One has the sense he's never satisfied by whatever he's doing.
Therefore it's more a dialogue of Leonardo with himself
than with the rest of artistic society.
"Verrocchio was making a picture
in which St. John was baptising Christ,
and Leonardo worked on an angel who was holding some garments.
Even though he was so young he accomplished it in such a manner
that it was much better than Verrocchio's own figures
that were located beside the angel of Leonardo.
This was the reason why Andrea never again wanted to touch colours,
dismayed that a young man understood painting better than he."
Giorgio Vasari.
"He's a poor pupil who does not surpass his master."
Leonardo.
I think that we see Leonardo in contrast to Verrocchio most clearly
in the Baptism of Christ in the Uffizi,
where a fairly orthodox landscape
is changed to a remarkable degree
as Leonardo's imagination literally floods the plain
to bring water and movement and light into a picture
that otherwise might have been somewhat static.
What Leonardo does is provide a unity,
a unifying factor that turns a good picture into a remarkable one.
Generally speaking, and we certainly see this with Raphael later,
the young artists tend to get commissioned
to do smaller scale paintings.
The less expensive ones, as it were.
Which is Madonnas and portraits,
and in Leonardo's case, portraits of women in particular.
He's already getting the narrative Madonna,
which was one of his great contributions
to reforming "Madonna and Child" painting.
So he's already, in these little pictures
which are, on the whole, conventional subjects,
he's already stretching his wings, as it were.
"Leonardo then made a picture of Our Lady
which was in the possession of Pope Clement VII,
and which is very excellent.
Amongst other things that were in it,
he reproduced a carafe full of water containing some flowers.
In addition to the marvellous lifelikeness of the flowers,
he had imitated the dewdrops of the water on them,
so that they seemed more alive than life itself."
Giorgio Vasari.
"Little babies are thin at all their joints,
and the intervals located between the joints are fat,
and this happens because the skin over the joints is without any flesh
other than that of the nature of sinew,
while a juicy fleshiness is found between one joint and another."
Leonardo.
"The first intention of the painter
is to make a flat surface display a body
as if modelled and separated from this plane,
and he who surpasses others in this skill deserves most praise.
This accomplishment, with which the science of painting is crowned,
arises from light and shade."
Leonardo.
I think if Leonardo had died early,
we would regard this little group of early pictures as being very strange.
He's doing things that other artists weren't trying to do,
and they're very brilliant but slightly uneven.
If you look at Ginevra de' Benci you've got this extraordinary picture
with this woman looking at you very directly, which is very daring.
Normally, women were portrayed in profile.
This was a matter of social decorum.
Her flesh is painted with extraordinary subtle modelling
and he's used his hand in the paint
and in that sheen of hair at the top, within the juniper bush,
absolutely daggering these sharp leaves out against the sheen,
creating this amazing contrast.
He trained as a sculptor, after all, amongst other things,
but he's saying, "This is what painting can do.
Sculpture can't do all this colouristic thing."
Then you go into this amazing, misty landscape.
You've got trees which fade into the background
and, of course again, sculpture can't do these atmospheric effects
in quite that way.
He is much obsessed, later on,
saying that painting is the superior art to everything, including sculpture
and he seems to be doing this, in a way, in the portraits.
It's a strange portrait;
quite a lot of the Leonardos look at us very hard,
which is always unsettling.
The Madonna Benois is popular and will always stay popular
because it brings you this kind of happiness
which, in principle, is not the issue in the story of The Virgin and the Christ,
because she knows what is going to happen to her child.
And this young girl doesn't know, which is maybe wrong philosophically,
because it's a story of tragedy.
We have to understand it is a tragedy because he suffered because of us.
It's joy, enjoyment, and she's happy.
But art always needs some explanation
so here we have these white flowers in the sign of a cross.
It's for all those who are looking at it.
If you are a Christian you see something like a cross,
it must mean something.
So when you see the cross, and you see the mother and child,
you must remember that the child will be crucified on the cross.
In Leonardo first of all he was always experimenting and experimenting,
but also he was developing into the line of developing mystery.
All these shadows and all these strange looks and strange smiles.
He was developing and experimenting together.
He was doing experiments to develop something more mysterious.
Leonardo had an ambition of thought
that would have singled him out in any community at any time.
So he saw painting, which was, of course, his primary medium,
as the way to both explore and express a new understanding,
a new investigation of the world and of God's laws of creation.
I think that that's the key.
So we don't know very much about his biography at this point.
We know that he was likely homosexual
and that there were other things
that would have given him a kind of slightly outsider-insider status.
He was certainly not distracted ever by family duties.
He was, therefore, somewhat self-indulgent in some ways.
He was somebody who had the time
and gave himself the space
to undertake this extraordinary investigation of the world.
Leonardo, the man, is very elusive.
The notes we have of what Leonardo looked like and how he behaved...
First of all, there is only one reputable likeness of him,
and that's at Windsor.
It's a profile drawing.
Very beautiful, fine features, very beautifully dressed hair,
which corresponds to descriptions.
The testimony is, and we can see from his notes
as to what he bought for his entourage to buy,
they dressed very well, very stylishly,
and part of Leonardo's point as a painter was the painter was a gentleman.
He wasn't like a sculptor who sat there covered in dust like a baker,
as Leonardo put it.
So he aims to cultivate this very courtly, very well-mannered exterior.
I think he inspired immense loyalty
with this very tight circle of intimate, young men
that he kept around him,
but I think in other respects he's very elusive.
Leonardo is widely understood
as one of the great polymaths of the Renaissance.
He was experienced and skilled in painting, sculpture, architecture,
engineering and many branches of the sciences as well,
study of botany, anatomy, geology and so on.
It's important to understand that these are Leonardo's working papers;
they are his drawings and notes towards his scientific and artistic projects.
Leonardo was also one of the most skilled draughtsmen of the Renaissance.
so he was able to take this wonderful vision of the world around him
and to get it down on paper.
And it is through his drawings that we get an insight into Leonardo the man;
how his mind worked, how he pulled his projects together.
It's a unique way to understand what Leonardo was doing in his daily work.
He's left behind a record of a personality
who is thinking through his hands at every moment of the day.
He sees something, he sketches it.
He wants to remember something, he writes a list on the same page,
he makes notes to himself about what other kinds of things to study
but also what to have for lunch.
So he doesn't separate out his artistic life, his scientific life
from his personal life.
He leads this extraordinarily inquisitive,
curiosity-focused existence.
Leonardo was fascinated by horses
and equine anatomy throughout his career,
and some of his first drawings of horses were done in connection
with The Adoration of the Magi,
a commission from the convent of San Donato a Scopeto,
which is just outside Florence, on the way to Pisa,
and Leonardo makes a large number of studies of horses.
Neither of these figures, and the horses,
appear exactly as they are in these drawings in the painting.
There are comparable figures
but they're not in that sense studies directly for the painting.
As images of horses, particularly, they're very contrasting.
On one, you've got these horses ambling.
He's obviously very interested in the position of the feet
to suggest a sense of movement.
The action, if you like, the energy,
is happening in the form of the riders on top,
who are blowing trumpets.
He's making his mind up about which direction they're going.
And by contrast, this other drawing is just bursting with energy.
The horse lurches forward and there's this amazing billowing cloak behind him,
so there's this pool of energy between horse and rider.
What they do have in common, I think though,
is that he gives the horses this amazing monumentality.
With this drawing in particular,
there are various sets of hooves there as he tries to suggest the movement
and get the position of the horse in that rearing state
and again trying to draw this billowing,
this transparent piece of drapery,
caught in the wind and create that sense of energy.
It's a sort of breathlessness and a freshness
in the way he handles the medium, which is extraordinary.
"Leonardo da Vinci has undertaken to paint a panel
for our main altarpiece,
which he is obliged to have completed in 24 or at the most 30 months.
He must supply his own colours and gold and any other expenses he might incur."
Contract for the Adoration of the Kings for San Donato a Scopeto, July 1481.
If we are looking at finished and unfinished paintings,
the first great Leonardo must be the Adoration of the Magi.
It completely reworks that subject
and turns it into something urgent, passionate and completely novel,
in terms of the tenor of the composition,
the turbulence, the sheer disturbance of the arrival of Christ on Earth.
The Adoration of the Kings by Leonardo da Vinci
leaves us increasingly surprised the more we look at it
and especially after the recent restoration
which was done by us here at the Opificio
we can much better understand this work
even in its unfinished state.
Here he assembles more than 70 figures
all drawn by hand.
There is clearly an impetus on Leonardo's part
to try to create a composition
that he knows he probably can't complete.
We don't know how many of these sketched figures
would have been in the final work
but there is clearly not the space for all of them.
The restoration of the Adoration of the Kings lasted five years.
The biggest surprise was that
underneath all these varnishes
which had deposited one after the other on the surface
a level of transparency was recovered
that revealed the space.
What had seemed to be exclusively
a painting entirely on a single plane
thus a two-dimensional painting
suddenly recovered this sense of genuine space.
Leonardo was commissioned to paint the Adoration of the Kings
by the monks of San Donato in Scopeto.
Leonardo worked for them for only a relatively short time.
We have documents that tell us
it was a few months, at most a year.
The painting remained unfinished
because Leonardo headed for Milan leaving behind the city of Florence.
In Milan Leonardo could find a way to establish himself more
perhaps more easily than he could in Florence
where there was more competition.
In the 1480s, Leonardo decides to get out of Florence.
He goes for a wide range of reasons.
In part he's pushed, he hasn't finished a whole lot of commissions
and he owes people some money.
In part he's pulled because Milan is this wonderful growing, vibrant city
ruled not by a legitimate Duke of Milan
but by the uncle,
Ludovico Maria Sforza, a man of enormous talent and ambition.
We have a surviving letter from Leonardo,
a draft, not in his own hand,
which explains why the duke should hire him.
He goes through an extraordinary range of opportunities and talents
that he can offer to this new ambitious ruler.
He can provide war machines, he can do bridges,
he can do architecture of all types.
At the very end of this letter we get a short line,
it says simply, "Oh, and I can paint as well."
The Sforza family ruled
and the idea that an artist's relationship
with a great prince was emblematic of their mutual powers,
their joint creativity,
was something which would allow Leonardo a freedom of movement,
a freedom of expression,
that he would never have encountered in Florence.
"The painter who has knowledge
of the cords, muscles, and tendons
will know well in moving a limb which cord is the cause of its motion
and which muscle in swelling is the cause of the contraction of this cord,
and which cord, transformed into the thinnest cartilage,
surrounds and binds together the said muscle.
By these means he will become a varied and comprehensive demonstrator
of the various muscles in keeping with various effects in the figure."
Leonardo.
I love the Saint Jerome in particular,
partly because it's a picture about vision.
Saint Jerome is having a vision of the crucifix,
as a result of his self-punishment with a rock,
so this idea that there's a connection
between the bodily and the spiritual that is being played out for us.
I believe that the lion in the foreground
Leone, Leonardo.
I think that the fact that the lion is so much a part of the picture,
normally he's tucked away as a kind of attribute
that helps identify Saint Jerome,
says something about how Leonardo
is placing himself in the work
and placing himself as the observer of the saint's activity
and of the saint's vision.
Leonardo's painting technique is very particular
and I think the most important thing to realise about it
is that it gave him room for manoeuvre.
Some of that is to do with the use of oil paint
that allows him to work more slowly than tempera would have done,
the medium that his master Verrocchio used,
but some of it is to do with simply a kind of planning and thinking
and overlaying that is something one comes to look for in a work by Leonardo.
He talks about the capacity of a painter to find the image,
the clear image, from within almost a, sort of, muddle of ideas.
So he might plan quite carefully on paper.
He might draw a cartoon, he might transfer that to a panel,
but that's only the beginning for the next creative process.
He's certainly not filling in the drawing with colour.
He's continuing to work and rework.
So it's recently been realised that the unfinished St. Jerome
contains observations of anatomy that he made in the years around 1490,
but then he came back to it in the first part of the 16th century,
when he was revisiting his first sequence of anatomical investigations
and he thought again about the neck,
the shoulder bone and all those areas in that picture.
So the paintings themselves would mirror his thinking
and his investigation as they themselves evolved.
We tend to separate out the secular from the sacred.
This is a divide that neither Leonardo nor his patrons would have recognised.
The court of Milan that Leonardo joined
was very, very interested in Platonic philosophical concepts,
the notion that you can understand the divine through the idealised.
So in taking the best and the most beautiful
and then idealising them in a single image you are getting closer to God,
you are getting closer to the divine,
you are getting closer to the truth.
Leonardo da Vinci painted The Virgin of the Rocks
at some point after 1483.
He painted it for the Brotherhood of the Immaculate Conception
for a chapel in the church of San Francesco Grande in Milan.
In this picture Leonardo shows the Virgin Mary
taking St. John the Baptist under her protection
while he kneels in adoration of the Infant Jesus
who is centred at the bottom of the composition.
The Infant Jesus is under the protection of an angel.
Leonardo chose a background composed of rocks
which most definitely has a symbolic meaning.
The rocks create a sort of grotto, a place of refuge
imbued with symbolism
that seeks to reveal the purity
and chastity of the Virgin Mary.
This is truly a place protected from original sin
which therefore echoes the idea of the immaculate conception.
In The Virgin of the Rocks
we can see the great attention that Leonardo pays
to everything concerning the natural world.
The rocks, flowers, plants
that are scattered throughout this composition.
So it reflects in part Leonardo's world
but this precise representation of nature
is actually an image of the incarnation of God.
God is made man in this painting.
You see Jesus who is placed on the Earth
and Leonardo is seeking to represent this mystery of the incarnation
in the broader sense of nature,
a history that begins with God's creation.
He's showing us a humanity that is revitalised and renewed
by the arrival of Christ on Earth.
Something that's absolutely wonderful in this painting
is the use of light and shade.
The lighting is really very dark
since we have no natural sunlight
so the lighting is very delicate, very mysterious
which brings this mystery of the incarnation to life.
Leonardo also pays great attention
to the transformation of colour under the effects of light.
The Virgin of the Rocks is without doubt
the first masterpiece by Leonardo
in which one can admire
the extremely sophisticated, extremely fine way
in which this colour is rendered
particularly the reds and the shadows
which transform the painting into a tonal vision.
This is undeniable.
Madonna Litta is the main icon of the Hermitage for many people.
It's very profound, it's very human,
there's a very strong feeling of sorrow, with the beautiful face of the Madonna.
It has fantastic colours,
it's the colours that also brings people to look at it.
It works very well together with Madonna Benois
because, you know, simple but still it works.
This is a young Leonardo and here the girl is so happy,
she doesn't know what will happen to her child.
And there you have Leonardo of age, it was painted in Milan,
and here you have Madonna which knows
what will happen to her child and so it is very profound.
Certainly there is some idea that maybe some of the pupils of Leonardo
participated in doing this painting;
it's very much possible.
In Madonna Litta, look at her eyes,
because her eyes and her figure in general,
this is the best pronounced idea of Madonna.
Leonardo's first posting away from Florence to Milan
seems to have been for his musical skills,
not for his artistic or engineering skills.
He was sent as a sort of diplomatic present to the Duke of Milan,
who apparently was very keen on the sound of the lira da braccio,
which is a sort of violin instrument particularly good for improvising on.
And Leonardo tipped up, and supposedly played better,
according to Vasari in his Lives of the Artists,
than all the Milanese musicians,
which must have been intensely irritating for them.
Leonardo says about music that it's similar to painting
because in the same way that the limbs have a proportionality between them,
seen in his Vitruvian Man, for example,
the intervals in music had this same relationship based on maths.
And so, in the same way that painting is science made visible,
science is made audible in music.
"Music is not to be regarded other than as the sister of painting,
inasmuch as she is dependent on hearing,
second sense behind that of sight.
She composes a harmony from the conjunction of her proportional parts,
which make their effect instantaneous,
being constrained to arise and die in one or more harmonic intervals.
My approach shall be just as the musician's is with notes."
Leonardo.
Leonardo is a highly experimental painter
but he's not stupid, he's also going to produce the kinds of work
that his patrons want and that his patrons will pay for.
So he develops a highly characteristic style of his own
which reflects not simply his understanding
of how people look and see
but also of what they want to see in front of them.
We don't really know why this painting was created.
Most likely it was a commission from Leonardo's patron
Duke Ludovico Sforza, requesting a portrait of his mistress.
In this painting we see a beautiful woman
who is in love and committed to Ludovico Sforza.
We know she was a well-educated person
who wrote poetry
while at the same time she was lauded
and considered a muse by other artists.
I think that her extraordinary attributes and unique qualities
led to her achieving an exceptional position in Ludovico's court.
Leonardo's painting is remarkable
in the way that it deals
with a subject in motion.
Cecilia Gallerani is turning towards someone
who is outside the painting's frame.
We are dealing with a snapshot,
a portrait which shows one specific moment.
The painting is exceptional due to its intimacy.
It is exceptional thanks to the technique used
but it also carries an enormous emotional charge.
Thinking about its history
but also about the story of Cecilia Gallerani
we can contemplate pure beauty.
"If the poet says that he can inflame men with love,
which is the central aim in all animal species,
the painter has the power to do the same, and to an even greater degree.
In that he can place in front of the lover the true likeness of the beloved,
often making him kiss and speak to it."
Leonardo.
La Belle Ferronni?re is a painting
about which we know relatively few historical details.
Nevertheless there is enough evidence
to help us understand where and when
Leonardo painted this lovely portrait.
The young woman in the painting
is dressed in clothing that was the height of fashion
in Milan towards the end of the 1480s and 1490s.
We can therefore be absolutely certain
that Leonardo painted this portrait
when he was living under the patronage of Ludovico Sforza.
One of the most appealing theories for La Belle Ferronni?re
is that it may be a portrait of Lucrezia Crivelli,
Ludovico Sforza's final mistress.
Her gaze may at first seem to be looking at us
but it isn't directed at the viewer, it slightly eludes us
and is turned to her left.
So you have the impression of a body in movement.
Ultimately this extremely seductive woman is slipping away from us.
She doesn't look at us and is turned away.
Much has been imagined and written about this gaze which escapes us.
Maybe this was something that Leonardo's patron wanted.
Maybe Ludovico Sforza, if the subject is one of his mistresses,
wanted to show in this painting that her gaze belongs only to him
and must elude any other viewer.
The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci
is a ghost in the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan.
It's a hint of what it must have originally looked like.
It's hard for us today, given the number of copies that exist,
given the influence that it has had
to really understand how radical it was in the period itself.
It was radical in the way it was painted
using highly experimental and unfortunately not very good techniques
in terms of its long-term survival.
It was radical in terms of the way that the apostles and Christ interact.
It was radical in the facial features that were pictured,
in the gestures,
in the astonishing interactivity of all of those characters.
And now we can only get a hint
of just how beautiful it must have once been.
This is an academic copy
made for posterity, as well as,
perhaps, by one of Leonardo's pupils trying to come closer to the master.
But looking at the composition of this
and looking at where Leonardo sited the original,
it's something to do with the level of ambition,
the illusion, the notion that all art requires a leap of faith.
But this one, perhaps unlike anything that's happened before,
would have seemed to the people who saw it as miraculous.
This really did suggest another room,
another space, in which recognisable human beings were eating.
The idea that that would be sited in a dining room
where monks would look up to it has additional resonance.
And it's something to do with the sum total of Leonardo's explorations
both into the human face, into the human figure,
theology, architecture, optics.
It's his masterwork.
It's clear that this is a heftily contracted work
between Leonardo and Ludovico Sforza
but, at the same time, it's clear that Leonardo either has license to
or pushes at the boundaries of what had been produced
in images of the Last Supper before.
So it starts with conventional theology, the moment where Christ says,
"One of you will betray me,"
but, even as you look at the work,
you realise it conflates a series of mini-narratives into one image.
It has this kind of underlying rhythm that binds it together.
It has this central figure and actually everything emanates from Him.
So you see Saint James throwing his arms out.
You see Saint Thomas pointing upwards as if to say,
"Is this the will of God?"
And actually Judas is always interesting in the Last Supper,
and not just in the way that he carries the bag of silver,
it becomes the symbol of his betrayal,
but the way that Peter leans across to whisper manically in Saint John's ear;
he pushes Judas away but towards us,
so he's both of the scene and separated from it.
Because of publishing and mechanical reproduction, photography,
we have a much greater sense of histories of art
and what's important because of reproduction,
but we forget that actually it was only the most public of monuments
that had that broad appeal.
A lot of art was produced for private spaces
churches.
This work was produced for a private dining room of a monastery in Milan
and yet, in its lifetime, stories spread.
The work became an object of curiosity. People wanted to see it.
In the way we look at the Renaissance,
there's no doubt that this work is a major pivotal moment.
We should take into account Leonardo did lots of other things.
One of his roles was as an impresario, visual things at the court,
doing stage scenery and so on.
The one glimpse of this we have, really, from finished, surviving works,
is the Sala delle Asse.
This is a big, corner room in this majestic Sforza castle.
It's very battered, it was completely overpainted at one point.
So, it was completely covered in.
It's now undergoing more restoration
and there are some bits that absolutely speak of Leonardo.
He conceived a scheme of decoration
with trees coming up from a rocky substratum,
and you can see the roots.
There are drawings for the roots amongst these horizontal rocks.
They rise in the form of great trunks,
and then these ramify through the ceiling,
Ludovico Sforza's nickname was il Moro,
which is the mulberry, or the black man.
So, this is emblematic of Ludovico il Moro.
There is a gold chain running through them.
Again, a knotted chain, which is almost certainly reference
to the d'Este family, his wife was Beatrice d'Este,
and in the centre there is the dynastic shield of Ludovico and of Beatrice.
"Leonardo has just finished a little picture
he is doing for one Robertet, a favourite of the King of France.
It is of a Madonna seated as if she were about to spin yarn.
The child has placed his foot on the basket of yarns
and has grasped the yarnwinder
and gazes attentively at the four spokes that are in the form of a cross.
As if desirous of the cross he smiles and holds it firm,
and is unwilling to yield it to his mother
who seems to want to take it away from him.
This is as much as I could get from Leonardo."
Fra Pieto.
Leonardo was around in 1499, when the French arrived
and, Florimond Robertet,
who was Secretary of State to three successive French kings,
was amongst the invaders and he commissioned a small Madonna
and we have an eye witness, Fra Pietro da Novellara,
the Head of the Carmelites in Mantua, writing a letter to Isabella d'Este,
who describes what Leonardo is doing.
He describes a little dramatic picture, and we had two versions of that.
You can see what's happening,
that these two pictures are on the easels in the studio
and Leonardo develops a bit in one, he develops a bit in another,
and you can almost see, step by step, how these are resulting.
They come out as very beautiful pictures
with some studio participation, undoubtedly.
But it's a fascinating insight to say he's doing this for Robertet,
so why don't we do another very saleable one beside it?
If there's one thing that everyone can agree on
it's that the Mona Lisa is truly the most famous painting in the world.
Not only the most famous painting by Leonardo da Vinci
but of all time, by any artist.
This painting is quite extraordinary, for various reasons.
Leonardo himself created a myth around this painting.
Then its theft at the beginning of the 20th century.
Then its reinterpretation by various artists
and its use in advertising
means that it has become the embodiment of painting,
the most famous image of all the pictures ever painted.
There's been much discussion about the identity of the sitter
but I think that we can state with some certainty
that the Mona Lisa depicts a Florentine woman
called Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo.
We know that she was born in Florence in 1479
although the family was from the surrounding areas of Florence
around Siena.
We know she married a certain Francesco del Giocondo
who was a silk merchant and whose business was doing very well
so it really was a decent marriage.
We can assume that Leonardo had a special relationship with this family,
maybe with this woman
and that her face and her personality
was of sufficient interest to encourage him
to paint her and make this one of his greatest masterpieces.
The extraordinary thing about the Mona Lisa
is the subtlety of her expression.
People have always said that she is smiling
but the smile isn't very pronounced.
Some people have seen a touch of melancholy
or other human expressions.
Leonardo brings this subtle smile to life
thanks to his technique, known as sfumato.
No edges can be seen.
There is an initial edge, or rather lines
but Leonardo blurs these by overlaying layers of paint in glazes.
These are layers of extremely transparent oil paint
and this is what creates this sense of vibration,
this extremely vibrant effect that the smile has.
And this is what gives subtlety
and mystery to the expression.
I've been lucky enough to see the Mona Lisa out of its frame
and in a light that penetrated
its current, very brown varnish,
to reveal a range of colour that is absolutely astonishing.
It has not just the gravity, the timelessness,
the eternal feminine that people talk about,
but it has a kind of immediacy, a sense of a real personality.
So the Mona Lisa is both Leonardo's ideal
and a real Florentine woman who he chose to represent that ideal.
I think that's the part that sometimes gets left out.
She's become so emblematic, so iconic,
that we don't see the human being anymore.
Artists work in a number of different ways
and one thing that one can say unquestionably about Leonardo
is that he worked slowly and extraordinarily thoughtfully,
as well as erratically.
So all of his pictures, I think,
were the result of tremendous planning
and then a process that was of continual creativity,
to a point where it was never really clear
when a picture was actually finished and when it wasn't.
What happened, to my mind, in Mona Lisa is it begins as a portrait,
and Leonardo progressively, over the years,
poured everything he knew about the painting and poetry
into that single picture.
So it becomes a very remarkable, complicated thing.
You've got the optics.
He is looking, at that time, at the complexity of the human eye,
and he says, "The eye does not know the edge of any body."
This extreme blurring and indefiniteness is a scientific thing
but it's also a poetic thing.
It also corresponds to this poetic, beloved lady
who is always out of reach.
You can look at the physics of drapery.
He is interested in how different thicknesses of drapery
compress and curl, and so on.
You've got the mountainous landscape, which is full of geology.
You've got a high lake and a low lake,
and he says at one point "the Arno Valley was like that."
The amount he puts into it in terms of science is just extraordinary,
the amount he puts into it in terms of poetry and psychology,
it's just extraordinary.
So it becomes what I call a "universal picture."
Everything he can do in painting is all put into that
and even if we only get out a fraction of it as a spectator,
it is still very remarkable.
To me the extraordinary thing about the Salvator Mundi
is that it precisely demonstrates
how Leonardo's observation of natural phenomena
can be used at the service of the creation of a vision of God.
For example, looking at the hands,
which have an immediacy and a presence,
they practically break out of the painting into our realm,
and how that's contrasted with this
almost spectral quality for the face of Christ.
I think what Leonardo's doing there is showing that,
as an artist whose talent was, as he would have believed, God-given,
that he has access to a vision of Christ which was beyond the norm,
which was almost miraculous in its own right
and he's bringing Christ into the present,
into our imaginations,
through the power of his imagination.
He creates a whole world around that crystal orb,
and he chooses to both represent the world as you see it
and to then edit and distort in order to arrive at a greater truth.
To me, at least, Leonardo is all about arriving at the greater truth.
The image itself, the idea of the Salvator Mundi subject
is actually rather archaic, it's an old one.
That is a frontal portrayal of Christ blessing with one hand,
holding an orb in the other.
But what Leonardo does is take something that is very traditional
and creates something much broader and deeper with it.
In the orb, taking something which is normally...
Let's say it began as a representation of the Earth
and then not just turning it into a glass sphere
but into a crystal sphere and something that really represents the Universe
rather than just the Earth.
In the same way the image of Christ is not one of a forbidding figure,
it's one of someone that one can relate to in this very personal way,
even in an emotional way.
So I think what he's done here is given this new life and new meaning.
My own sense with this picture is that
it was painted over a long period of time,
as many of Leonardo's pictures were.
So it may well have begun as a commission
but it would seem that it's a picture that began
in the very first years of the 16th century
and that he had with him when he died.
So if there were a specific patron at the beginning
there certainly wasn't one at the end
and I think it allowed Leonardo to do whatever he wanted to.
One aspect I think that's particularly interesting
is looking at the picture in relation to The Last Supper,
because, of course, in The Last Supper,
the figure of Christ is not terribly well preserved.
And early on it was said in written accounts
that Leonardo couldn't bring himself to portray Christ,
that it was just somehow beyond him.
I think that we know that's not necessarily the case now,
because here he has tackled this most challenging subject
and created this indelible image of Christ
as a figure who is both divine and human.
How one defines Leonardo in looking at the picture is a hard thing to define.
One aspect is certainly the quality of the picture
and the absolute phenomenal way in which optical effects are conveyed,
whether it's the shadow on the fingernail of the blessing hand
or whether it's the change in tonalities across the skin tones of Christ.
But beyond that I think it's the effect,
it's this emotional direct connection that one has
between the viewer and this man who painted this picture 500 years ago.
That's really something that can't be imitated.
For a long time it was thought that the monks of the brotherhood
had rejected the painting of The Virgin of the Rocks
for iconographic reasons.
But they didn't reject the painting,
they just didn't agree to pay Leonardo more for it.
Nevertheless he adapted it, changing it for another buyer.
This painting passed to another art lover,
possibly the Duke of Milan himself.
But ultimately Leonardo was bound by the contract from the Immaculate Conception.
So he painted a second picture,
the version which is now in the National Gallery, London.
One of the key evolutions between this work and the one in the Louvre
is the fact that he's thought about the way
he might unify the space
and make a more convincing depiction of the grotto,
which goes up above, to the top of the composition.
There's no sky above, as in the Louvre work,
and the way he can make quite dramatic use of dappled lighting
to fall across the forms in certain ways,
like the way it catches the front of the Baptist's left foot
or falls across the arm of the angel and you see the void behind.
All those things, I think, are based and rooted in observation,
and then twisted, I think,
to enhance the kind of expressive qualities of the work.
The advance in this work has to do with the kind of guiding intelligence
about how the whole is orchestrated,
how the rich dark-brown under-modelling
that lies beneath the whole thing is brought up in a way
that it makes the use of selective colour
much more effective and believable.
You have here an interest, of course, in giving the Virgin
the most brightly coloured, the most strongly saturated hues
but the angels are wearing similar colours in a lower key.
All of that colour, kind of being corroded by shadow
is very, very carefully worked out.
I certainly look at the way the materials are used in the angel,
where it's the concentration of effort
to create the effect that he wishes
when you have this kind of brownish, almost grisaille under-modelling
that's really exploited and left to tell very strongly in the angel's costume.
Then it's a selective area where he's built up the highlights,
and where he's put the fine detail, and where it's not there.
I think those choices are the things that are truly thrilling
and speak absolutely to the hand of Leonardo.
He thought about audience probably less than many artists
because I think he didn't seem to be a "people-pleaser"
in terms of looking at the history of his commissions.
One has the sense that his interests were his own concerns
and how he might express those.
The paintings themselves
are almost an illustration of his intellectual endeavour
rather than an end product,
and so I think "finish" meant something different to him.
It certainly feels that way.
I don't think it's the same single-minded pursuit
of fame and reputation you might find in other artists
who were more concerned with success in the conventional sense.
I think this was a devotional object, obviously,
but I think it also always would have been understood
by the more educated or the more enlightened viewers
in the late 15th century as something that had these other artistic,
intrinsic artistic interest as well.
its impact in religious, philosophical, or psychological terms.
I think in some ways there's an essential truth that still survives
and comes to us even in a gallery in the 21st century.
St. John the Baptist remains quite a mysterious painting
but we can assume that Leonardo
worked out its composition between 1506 and 1508
when he was living between Florence and Milan.
St. John the Baptist was very popular in Florence,
indeed he's one of the patron saints of the city.
Did he paint this picture for a Florentine art lover?
Or could it be that he painted this picture for himself?
As an act of devotion
and also as an act of artistic research?
It's possible.
What is wonderful about St. John the Baptist
is that it reveals a huge amount about Leonardo's research into light.
St. John the Baptist is an extraordinarily economical painting.
There is practically no colour.
There are only transitions from shadow to light.
And this St. John the Baptist is perhaps the most beautiful illustration
of the first words of the Gospel according to St. John,
namely words uniquely centred
on the appearance of light in darkness.
The first light announcing the arrival of Jesus Christ
but a light that will disappear.
And Leonardo shows us this here.
We are faced with an apparition
but an apparition that is destined to disappear.
And that is the ambiguity of this painting.
Is this an appearance or a disappearance?
Leonardo shows us both.
This is one of the most beautiful
and extraordinary works from a pictorial perspective
in terms of its economy
and truly as an artistic creation.
Leonardo, from 1507 to 1513, is in Milan and he is a painter,
an engineer, to the French king, Louis XII.
So, he has very strong links with the French.
He then goes to Rome under Medician patronage.
Leo X, Giovanni de' Medici, became the very young Pope
and Leonardo's patron was Giuliano, who was Pope Leo's brother.
You've certainly got the younger artists.
You've got Michelangelo in Rome,
he had finished the Sistine ceiling by the time Leonardo arrived,
and Raphael is doing amazing narratives.
Giuliano dies, he dies quite young, and Leonardo is left without a patron.
He then got a very good offer.
He was paid a huge amount by Francis I, the French king,
basically Francis had bought a star,
like a football club would now buy a star striker.
You had bought your star artist.
Leonardo crossed the Alps
and he carried three masterpieces
which are the Mona Lisa, St. Anne, and St. John the Baptist.
It was a long journey and certainly his last.
The king gave him the use of the ch?teau
with an income of a thousand ?cus which was a fortune
and the freedom to work on royal commissions.
He was expected to do things,
but the pressure in Florence was for hand to mouth,
you know, of doing a painting and being paid.
He wasn't well suited for that.
So, being an ornament of the great Renaissance court of Francis I
suited him very well.
Like Henry VIII in Britain,
part of Francis' ambition was to attract in big artists.
They saw themselves as great Renaissance princes
buying into the new learning in visual arts,
in literature, in music, and so on.
So Francis is immensely important,
and I think a very gracious patron to Leonardo
in the last three years of his life.
"The king, who had often lovingly visited him,
arrived one day, and out of reverence,
Leonardo raised himself in bed to a sitting position,
speaking of his illness and the symptoms he was exhibiting,
and above all how he had given offense to God
and to the people of the world
for not having worked on his art as he should have done.
Leonardo expired in the arms of the king."
Giorgio Vasari.
Of Leonardo's last paintings
The Virgin and Child with St. Anne is doubtless the most ambitious.
St. Anne, the Virgin Mary and the Infant Jesus.
And Leonardo kept on working on this history scene
right up to the end of his life.
This painting is also hugely important because
of Leonardo's last paintings
it is this one that offers an extremely rich
and global vision of nature.
The painting contains Leonardo's finest landscape
because it has a monumental quality that is extraordinary,
even more imposing than the landscape in the Mona Lisa.
And the ground, made up of layers of rock,
is absolutely extraordinary.
Without doubt
if you want to study Leonardo da Vinci
when you look at his work as a whole
The Virgin and Child with St. Anne should be regarded
as the culmination of his research
and the work that best reveals
his scientific, poetic and artistic investigations.
But I would say that there's a second aspect
that I particularly like in this painting
and that is the Virgin Mary's face.
Here again Leonardo has achieved something extraordinary,
this understanding of the human expression.
Leonardo died before he could put
the final layers of glaze on the Virgin Mary's face.
It was the most subtle face and expression in the entire painting
and he was trying to express the moment of the Virgin Mary's conversion.
The moment when the mother of Jesus
accepts the death of her son.
From being a mother,
someone who wishes to prevent this death,
she becomes instead the mother of God.
She accepts this destiny and his journey towards death.
And so we have this smile
which emerges from an expression of sadness
and it's only Leonardo, with his understanding of humanity,
of the human expression,
who is capable, with this poetry, this simplicity
of revealing such sentiments.
It was incredibly moving
when we restored the painting between 2010 and 2012
to discover Leonardo's final brushstrokes
on the Virgin Mary and on St. Anne's dress.
This really was for him his ultimate work
and the painting for which he never stopped
imagining additional refinements and new ideas
each one more sublime than the last.